Just released as a limited-edition gatefold double Lp by 20 Buck Spin, and also back in stock on CD via Profound Lore...

A lot of ears were turned on to the Alabama-based doom metal band Pallbearer back in 2010 when the band released their demo, a three-song dose of epic doom that included a cover of "Szomorú Vasárnap" ("Gloomy Sunday") by Hungarian composer Rezső Seress. That demo had people comparing Pallbearer to such titans of epic doom as Candlemass and Warning, and the praise was well-deserved; Pallbearer were capable of crafting immensely heavy music with catchy, moving hooks and amazing vocal melodies and displayed incredible songwriting chops. Everyone who loved that demo had been anxiously awaiting their first album, and Sorrow And Extinction lived up to all of the expectations and then some, appearing earlier this year on Profound Lore and delivering one of the best doom metal experiences in recent memory.

When the album opens, we are greeted by softly strummed acoustic guitar that creaks and scrapes beneath the fingers of the player, a sorrowful and fragile melody that feels almost funereal even as a bluesy twang enters into it, but when the full band finally drops in after a few minutes, you're blown back by the force of their majestic slow-mo metal. That first song "Foreigner" sets up the feel of the rest of the album, presenting a traditional doom metal sound with a unique melodic style that'll stick these songs in your skull for a quite awhile. The likes of Candlemass, Warning and Solitude Aeturnus are clearly an influence on Pallbearer's brand of doom, but the vocal melodies and hooks sound totally unique in the hands of frontman Brett Campbell, whose voice is a perfect mix of soulful emotion and dourness, drifting over Pallbearer's tectonic metal using multi-part harmonies to add a powerful, almost anthemic feel to their choruses. There's a couple of spots on that first song where they sound like a doom-metal version of a Kansas song, and it's pretty goddamn fantastic. No slouching on the heaviness, either; the riffs on this album are armored in lead, massive molten Sabbathian hooks crushing everything underfoot, with just the right amount of "swing" without taking anything away from the mournful, terminally downcast vibe of their music.

These guys are continuously compared to Yob due to the distinctive vocals and the sheer skull-caving heaviness, but Pallbearer sounds much more "classical" than their label-mates, infecting their old-school approach with slight hints of progressive rock and funereal psychedelia to produce what might be the doom album of 2012. Highly recommended!

      The return of the cosmic blast-attack. Planetarisk Sudoku is the newest sci-fi damaged spazz-gasm from this interstellar grindcore band headed up by the guy behind Parlamentarisk Sodomi and Brutal Blues, but while the previous album was a solo effort, this one has him teaming up with his Brutal Blues bandmate Anders Hana (also of Noxagt and Ultralyd) to execute his maniacal vision.

The album is essentially divided into two halves: the a-side tears through three tracks in about fifteen minutes, a high-speed splatter of choppy grindcore and insane free-jazz squonk sped up and stitched together into a jarring patchwork of eerie blastprog. As crazy as the debut was, this stuff feels even more complex and convoluted, the staccato guitar riffs slashing and slanting wildly through sprawls of Goblin-esque piano arrangements and swells of soundtracky strings, everything spit out into a maelstrom of abruptly shifting time signatures and extreme stop/start tempo changes that leave bloody skidmarks all over the album. The obvious influences that you could pick out on the first record are a little less in your face here; while the pungent stink of 70's era prog rock a la King Crimson still heavily permeates Psudoku's high-speed grind, all of this stuff comes together much more organically this time around, making for an even weirder listening experience. Big chunks of the album appear to be entirely instrumental, but then there's the bugfuck carnival blast of "NeURONaMO" with it's sputtering gorilla chants, blurts of monstrous nonsense over the whiplash-inducing mix of fucked-up fusiony electronics, discordant riffs and theremin abuse, blaring saxophones splattered against blasting mathy grindcore, resembling some crazed ketamine-sucking version of Behold...The Arctopus. And somehow, they manage to lodge some perversely catchy hooks in amongst this cuisinarted skronk-salad.

      Psudoku momentarily restrain themselves at the outset of the b-side track "PsUDoPX.046245", which takes up the entire side. Opening the song with a few minutes of eerie cosmic ambience, this placid intro allows the eminent extended blast-attack to sneak up on the listener. But also it moves in a different direction from the more grind-style songs on the first side. Here, the band spills out of that initial maelstrom of blastbeats and angular riffing into a twisting labyrinth of creepy prog rock, slipping into a killer Magma-esque instrumental passage for a bit before shifting into some more aggressive math-metal contortions strewn with bizarre vocal gibberish, then from there hurtling through continuously evolving passages of heavy jazz-damaged rock flecked with chilling orchestral ambience and blasts of Zeuhl-style choral voices, continuing to contort and confuse in glorious fashion all the way to the weirdly bright and joyous finale of the track. An absolutely bonkers album, anyone into Naked City, Pryapisme, Colin Marston's various projects, Netjajev SS and similar extreme spazz-attacks will lose their fucking mind upon hearing this...

Part of the exhaustive History Of Violence reissue series from Bloodlust!, this re-mastered redux of Slogun's evil power electronics masterwork Will To Kill is one of my favorite albums from John Balistreri's "true crime electronics" outfit, one of the key architects of crushing American power electronics.

Originally released on cassette by Bloodlust! and Balistreri's own Circle Of Shit imprint back in 1996, Will To Kill is a titanic belch of hellish gas and acid from the bowels of Hell. Slogun has always been one of the heaviest American electronics artists, not just because of his relentlessly misanthropic outlook but also because the guy creates some of the most violent, bass-heavy electronic soundscapes around. When the first track "Kraft" kicks in, it just rolls over you like a bulldozer with it's crushing whoosh of radioactive winds and distorted synth drones. The klaxon warning chirps that come in later just make this sound even more like the final minutes before the thermonuclear wave hits. The other tracks on Will To Kill tend to maintain a similar level of brute destructive power, though there's plenty of atmospheric passages too, like the rumbling deep-space drones and smoldering noise on "Blood", which resembles something from Japanese cosmos-destroyers CCCC more than a typical PE outburst. On the other hand, "Street Cleaner" viciously blasts off into a killswarm of mangled radio transmissions, murderous distorted whispers ("....listen to me...listen to me...), dense distorted black winds buffet the speakers, a repulsively brain-melting blast of black electronics. Following electro-attacks like "Mindhunter" and "Trolling" are no less carnivorous, reveling in the bliss of predatory behaviors as a rain of acid feedback and wall-like distortion falls to earth. It's all a black seething mass of psychedelic electronic violence and total terror that climaxes with the serial killing mantra "Trash", an ode to Gary Ridgway aka the "Green River Killer".

Essential for anyone into Slogun's brutal electronics and the murderous extremes of underground industrial/noise.